


Saw The Water, Not The Waves

by gilligankane



Category: Glee
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-04
Updated: 2010-10-04
Packaged: 2017-11-17 07:43:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/549204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gilligankane/pseuds/gilligankane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If she were anybody else, she might have a romantic gesture planned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saw The Water, Not The Waves

**Author's Note:**

> Future!fic

It’s somewhere over Chicago – or maybe it’s Indianapolis. Everything looks the same from the tiny plane window – that Santana Lopez decides there is _something_  further up in the sky taking a perverse pleasure in fucking up her life.  
  
She obviously played a role in that, but here she is, trying to fix it, and the universe is saying, “ _Go straight to jail, directly to jail. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.00._ ”  
  
It’s pissing her off.  
  
“What’s your hurry?”  
  
Her seatmate stares at her leg, which has been bouncing up and down violently since the plane lifted off the tarmac in Denver.  
  
“Gotta use the john?” he asks, lifting up out of his seat a little as if he’s going to move into the aisle to let her pass. Santana regretted letting him have the aisle seat the minute they sat down, because the window makes her anxious and it’s a clear night and she can see everything through the double-thick, finger-smudged glass: her car parked across three spaces in her hurry to catch a last minute flight, the highway she sped down doing 115 mph from Pueblo to Denver, the state line she swore she’d never cross out of again. From the window, Santana can see the whole life she built for herself after high school slipping away in a blur of toy-sized houses and tiny dots of moving colors, and she breathes out slowly, trying to slow her racing heart.  
  
“I’m fine,” she mutters, turning her head and looking back out the window before slamming down the shade. Out of the corner of her eye, the man next to her flinches.  
  
“Well, could you quit it then?” he asks gruffly. “You’re making me nervous.”  
  
Her leg stills instantly and she clenches her left hand into a fist instead: flex, release, flex, release.  
  
A flight attendant leans towards her. “Miss, is there something I can get for you?”  
  
 _Her sanity, her pride, her dignity, a shot of Jack, the last five years of her life back_  are all at the tip of her tongue but she bites down on her bottom lip and shakes her head.  
  
Santana checks her watch – 1 hour until touchdown, another hour in the car and then maybe…  
  
She thumbs the edge of the card in her right hand, the stupid, heavy cream-colored card with tomorrow’s date etched across the top in sprawling letters that she knows too well; letters that once sprawled from the edge of her palm to the inside of her elbow in thick black ink she had to hide under her Cheerios uniform; letters that wrapped around the margins of her notebooks once upon a time; letters that still lined the edge of her windowsill back in Lima – not home, never home – promising  _Brittany loves Santana forever_  and the added afterthought,  _Santana loves Brittany too._  
  
The letters mock Santana as the captain announces their descent. They mock her as she waits impatiently to get off the plane. They mock her as she pressures the half-asleep car rental attendant into giving her the fastest car on the lot. They mock her from the passenger seat as she drives, headlights cutting through the Ohio night telling her that Lima is just ten miles further.  
  
Just ten miles.  
  
Ten miles and there’s no turning back.  
  
Not unless Brittany is coming back with her.  
  
\---  
  
Santana pulls over to the side of the road at the “ _Now Entering Lime, Ohio_ ” sign, breathing heavy, forehead pressed against the steering wheel.  
  
If she were anybody else, she’d have some sort of romantic gesture planned.  
  
There would be flowers and a boom box over her head and some Grey’s Anatomy-worthy speech that, along with the pleading, naked desperation in her eyes, would convince Brittany to stop this stupid game she’s playing and come to Pueblo with Santana, the way she should have forever ago.  
  
What she has, though, is half a tank of gas and that stupid, elegant little post card-shaped invitation and nothing else. Santana had left in a fit of last-minute decision-making, bred out of the startling reality of realizing her life had no meaning, hadn’t had meaning since the day she left Lima without Brittany. A hundred miles later and one ticket she probably couldn’t afford, she boarded a plane bound for Columbus and hadn’t stopped to think until now.  
  
Now it’s too late to turn around.  
  
Now there’s no going back.  
  
Now is when she rights every wrong she’s ever made in her life and  _gets her girl back_.  
  
“She’s not my girl,” she breathes out, reminding herself. “She’s Hudson’s.”  
  
Then there’s another voice in her head, screaming at her that she’s  _not_  Hudson’s, not until tomorrow morning, not if Santana finds the courage she lost somewhere between moving her life from Lima to Pueblo and gets her shit together.  
  
“ _Thunderstuck_ ” cuts through the silence of the car and she jumps, slamming back into the headrest, her eyes wide. She fumbles with her phone, dropping it once before it flaps halfway open, wide enough for her to press it against her ear.  
  
“What?” she breathes into the phone.  
  
There is no hello, no  _hey, Santana, what’s up?_  She only gets a grunt and, “ _you better be here._ ”  
  
“I’m here,” she promises, turning on her blinker and pulling back onto the empty road. “I’m almost there.”  
  
“You’re either here or you’re almost here, Santana. You can’t be both places.”  
  
She’s not in the mood for this shit, not from Rachel Berry, not on the night when she’s about to either begin her life or end it.  
  
“I’m almost there,” she repeats.  
  
“You better be,” Rachel says, hissing into the phone. “Or this is going to be the biggest mistake she ever makes.”  
  
 _And the biggest regret you’ll ever have,_  is the unspoken statement.  
  
“Where are you?” Rachel demands. “You better not be still at the airport. Your flight landed almost an hour and a half ago.”  
  
Santana sighs and turns down a street, on autopilot now.  _You might not be able to come home again,_  she thinks.  _But at least you’ll know where you’re going when you visit_. She passes by the high school, seeing the giant scoreboard with Sue Sylvester’s face plastered on it, then past the park and soon she’s parked at the corner of Brittany’s street, under the streetlight that still flickers on and off.  
  
Rachel is still idly threatening her, and she lets the phone slide from her shoulder to the floor of the car as she looks at Brittany’s house, front porch light blazing a path to the front door.  
  
She wishes she had a boom box.  
  
It might not be original, but it worked for Lloyd Dobbler.  
  
If nothing else, it proved that anything’s possible.  
  
\---  
  
It fell apart with startling clarity.  
  
Everything people told them was true – that fairy tales never really end when the book is closed and everyone is living happily ever after; that there can’t be so many good days with bad ones; that nothing ever lasts – but Santana figured if they survived high school in Ohio, they could survive a few months apart.  
  
The plan was simple on paper: Santana would study business at the University of Colorado and Brittany, in Lima taking care of her mom, would move down after her freshman year, after she was doing a little better.  
  
One school year; just seven months, with phone calls every day and texting through the classes Santana didn’t really need to pay attention in.   
  
When Brittany got the dancing job, Santana had flowers delivered.  
  
 _“It’s only as a teacher’s assistant,”_  Brittany had said.  _“It’s not a big deal.”_  
  
Santana had rolled her eyes and told Brittany to put the flowers in water, or they’d die.  
  
They started missing each other. Santana would be in class when Brittany left her a breathless voicemail in between errands. Brittany would be dancing when Santana, lying in bed studying, would call just to say hello.  
  
Classes got harder and Santana kept her phone on her desk in her dorm.  
  
Brittany got the teaching position when the owner decided to take it easy and worked from the moment the studio opened to the moment it closed.  
  
 _”Next year,”_  Santana promised over the phone.  _”Next year, I’ll be home for Christmas. There’s just this seminar…”_  
  
Brittany had understood; the studio was offering a six week intensive course and she’d be real busy anyway.  
  
It wasn’t until Santana had snuck home for a weekend – catching a red-eye on Thursday and skipping her economics course on Friday, her  _Lease Approved_ -stamped paper in her jeans pocket – that she saw what she’d been missing; that she saw the look on Brittany’s face while she was dancing and leading the Little Tapper’s class around in a circle, counting out the steps. It was nothing like her usual smile. It was brighter, if possible, and stretched further than Santana could ever remember it stretching before.  
  
It wasn’t until she saw that face that she knew she couldn’t ask Brittany to leave it behind.  
  
Santana thought she was being  _selfless_.  
  
It took a little while to realize the difference between  _selfless_  and  _selfish_  but by then it was too late to call and just say sorry.  
  
The studio in Lima wasn’t the only place Brittany could dance; Colorado, and then Pueblo, had one every other block that Brittany would have loved; could have loved, if Santana had given her a chance. But Santana couldn’t see past that smile and started pushing instead: ignoring phone calls and deleting the messages without listening to them, texting on Monday and not again until the next week, ‘forgetting’ to return every other email.  
  
Brittany pushed back so Santana pushed harder, going out and letting herself dance with tall blondes, not apologizing when the pictures appeared on the internet the next morning.  
  
It ended when Santana got a rare internship for the summer, in Pueblo. She made a phone call, just to tell Brittany that she wasn’t coming home after all.  
  
It ended when Brittany had said don’t bother; there wasn’t anything for her to come for anymore.  
  
\---  
  
It’s an accident that she presses the doorbell. Santana has a plan that involves running back to her car and going back to the black hole that is her life, but she’s standing with her thumb over the doorbell and in her final moment of hesitation, it skims the rounded edge of the button and presses down, involuntarily.  
  
When Brittany tells her to leave and never come back, she’ll maintain that she never meant to press the doorbell in the first place.  
  
It’ll be her last-ditch effort at some sort of dignity.  
  
Her feet seem stuck to the cement steps and even when she wills them to move, even when she looks down at them and hisses to get going, they lock tighter together and don’t do a damn thing except keep her rooted in place as a light inside goes on and someone gets closer to the door.  
  
“Please don’t be Brittany. Please don’t be Brittany. Please don’t be Brittany,” she prays. Her eyes widen and her words quicken. “Please don’t be Finn. Please don’t be Finn.”  
  
The door creaks as it opens and she lifts a hand to shield herself from the light flooding out around her. Something shifts – she can feel it in her body and in the air and in the way something lifts off her shoulders and is replaced with something else.  
  
But there’s no gasp. There’s no startled cry of her name. No long arms wind around her neck, or shoulders or arms. She lowers her hand and blinks a few times before her eyes adjust and Brittany is just standing there, one hip against the door frame, her arms crossed over her chest, entirely unimpressed. Her face is blank, her hair is pulled back and Santana’s heart clenches at the sight of her, in person.  
  
She wants to say something. Anything. She knows she  _needs_  to say something, but it’s like all her words, all her hopes, all her dreams have suddenly ceased to ever exist. Santana opens her mouth and nothing comes out.  
  
No breath. No words.  
  
Not a single thing slides up her throat and out from between her teeth.  
  
She’s always been all talk and some action; she was always the one with a snarky comment, or an unwarranted opinion; she was always the one who had something to say about anything, even if it was only to Brittany, even if it was mostly to Brittany.  
  
And now she’s standing in front of Brittany, dying to say a million things and not being able to say any of them.  
  
Brittany breaks first – Brittany always broke first, always let Santana win some silent game they were always playing – and sighs heavily in a way Santana has never heard before. “What do you want?”  
  
Santana almost flinches at the lack of emotion in Brittany’s voice. She knows she doesn’t deserve anything but maybe a slap across the face and a demand to stay away from Brittany for the rest of her life and she can just hear Brittany saying “ _it should be easy enough for you, since you left once before_ ”.  
  
But Brittany just stares blankly at her and Santana can’t be sure if she’s waiting for an answer or not.  
  
She decides to speak anyway. “Hey,” she croaks out, her voice breaking as if she hasn’t spoken in days. As if she didn’t spend the entire car ride talking herself up enough to do this.  
  
Brittany only shifts her weight to her other foot.  
  
Santana curses inwardly when her arm stretches forward, the invitation dangling between her forefinger and her thumb. Her body wouldn’t move, wouldn’t go when she wanted it to, but now it betrays her, hovering awkwardly between her and Brittany, stretching just enough to make her feel more uncomfortable than she already is.  
  
“I wanted to give you this,” she explains. Her words are heavy in her mouth, oily and thick, awkward. “I couldn’t find an envelope.”  
  
She can see the  _really?_  look in Brittany’s eyes but ignores it, keeping her arm steady as the blonde reaches out slowly, grabbing the corner furthest from Santana’s fingers and tugging it out of her grasp.  
  
“You didn’t fill it out,” Brittany says, her voice still flat. She holds the card up, showing the unmarked boxes. “You drove all the way here to give me a blank RSVP note?”  
  
“Flew,” she mutters. “I flew here.”  
  
It’s not the right thing to say, but it’s words and it’s a start and Santana is having a hard enough time trying to breathe and staying standing that she figures the wrong words can be enough for another minute or so.  
  
“What do you want, Santana?”  
  
For starters, she didn’t want Brittany to ask that question. That question has too many answers, too many qualifiers, and when she plays it out in her head, that question will only end in Santana on her knees, tears streaming down her face, begging Brittany to give her a second chance, give her the time of day, give her a sliver of mercy.  
  
Except that she owes Brittany something. She owes Brittany more than what she left her with: a mailed mixed CD of all their songs in Glee where they had a lead, sent for Brittany’s birthday, spontaneously, after a few drinks her sophomore year. She owes Brittany more than half-dialed phone call attempts and letters she shredded in her hands before they reached the mailbox; more than declining to come back to Lima – not home, never home – for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Father’s Day, just like that first year away.  
  
She owes Brittany the truth and an apology and a promise that she’ll never do it again, if she’s given a second – or third, or fourth, after all this time – chance.  
  
“Don’t marry him.”  
  
The words slip out and she wants to take them back immediately. She wants to reach up and pluck them out of the air and shove them down into the pocket of her jacket before the reach Brittany’s ears, but she’s too late, because Brittany’s face is twisting in confusion and then anger and the disbelief and then anger again and she’s too late.  
  
“No, Brittany, I didn’t mean-”  
  
“So you want me to marry him?”  
  
Santana chokes on the air  _wooshing_  from her lungs. “No. No, I don’t.”  
  
Brittany shrugs. “You either do or you don’t.”  
  
Without allowing herself to, she takes a step forward, her hands twisting together in a knot. “I don’t,” she says, only wavering on the last syllable.   
  
“I am,” Brittany says, her words cutting Santana through Santana like a knife. “Tomorrow, I will.”  
  
“You don’t have to,” she pleads.  
  
Brittany nods. “I don’t. But I’m going to. I told him I would.” She stares at Santana, holding her gaze before saying slowly, “ _I_  keep my promises.”  
  
Santana deserves that, she really does. But it hurts. It stings the only part of her heart that still exists, because the one thing she told herself, the one thing she told both of them, is that she would never make a promise to Brittany she couldn’t keep. She would never.  
  
She did, though, and Brittany has every right to throw that back in her face.  
  
“Yeah,” Santana breathes out, suddenly defeated.   
  
She entertains the idea of turning around and deeming it a wash; of calling Rachel and telling her that she chickened out and never got out of the car and Brittany is probably better off anyway; of driving back to the airport and flying back to Pueblo to her one-person apartment and her one-person kitchen table and her one-person bed. She thinks about it, she  _turns_  but there’s a nagging voice in the back of her head that sounds like Rachel and its calling her a coward and a fraud and when it tells her that giving up now must mean she never really loved Brittany, ever, she grits her teeth and turns back and steps up, forcing Brittany one step back into the house.  
  
“No,” she says. “No, I kept my promises. Most of them,” she amends, at the look on Brittany’s face. “I kept the ones that mattered. The ones that mattered most, I never broke those.”  
  
Brittany shakes her head. “You left. You left us. You broke that one.”  
  
“One. It was  _one_  promise.”  
  
“It was the one that meant the most.”  
  
Santana knows that’s true. “I’ll make it up to you.” She doesn’t say  _I promise_  because those words don’t hold enough weight right now, not yet. “I just need you to give me a chance to.”  
  
Brittany bites down on her bottom lip, and Santana watches her mouth move as if she’s counting numbers inside her head. “I gave you 1,268 chances,” she finally says.  
  
“I don’t…”  
  
Brittany splays her hand out against her hip. Santana remembers her hand being there, her hand fitting on the curve of bone as she gripped the pale skin, worshipping Brittany’s body. She wonders what Finn’s hand looks like when it’s there, if touches the tips of Brittany’s rib bones the way Santana’s hand did.  
  
“That’s how many days after we broke up that I waited until I said I’d go out with Finn. One thousand, two hundred and sixty days of sitting by the phone, or checking the mail, or looking out the window, waiting to give you this second chance you suddenly want.”  
  
Santana takes another step forward, seeing the first glimmer of something other than anger and disinterest in Brittany’s eyes. “I’ve always wanted a second chance,” she says instead of  _“We didn’t break up,”_  because they did and it was all her fault.  
  
Brittany shrugs her shoulders. “You’re about fifty-five days too late for that.”  
  
Another step. “Only fifty-five days?”  
  
“That’s when Finn proposed.”  
  
Santana sags against the handrail on the stairs, holding herself up. “I want another chance.”  
  
Brittany shrugs again, that irritating shoulder lift that means absolutely nothing. “You can’t always get what you want, remember?”  
  
Of course she remembers, it’s the first song on that damn CD that she plays once a month and twice a night if she’s drunk.  
  
“But you’re what I need.”  
  
Brittany’s mouth drops open a little bit and then a twisted sound comes out from between her lips. It takes Santana a few moments to understand that it’s actually laughter; that it’s Brittany’s laugh, loud and foreign to Santana’s ears and it’s the most amazing sound she’s heard in years.  
  
Then it dawns on her that Brittany is laughing and it’s inappropriate and Santana goes from grinning along with the blonde to frowning, her arms crossed over her chest, her shoulders falling in on her body.  
  
“I needed you too,” Brittany says when she’s clutching her stomach, taking deep breaths.  
  
 _Needed._.  
  
Past tense.  
  
“I mean,” Brittany continues, the corners of her lips tugging upward. “Did you really think that you could just show up and I’d just… forget? I counted days. I counted all the days you were gone.” Brittany shrugs. “I’m still counting,” she admits. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s just a teenager’s empty dream and I’m getting married. To a man who stuck around.”  
  
Santana knows Brittany is right: they were teenagers with dreams and imagined plans and reality has become something different, so she switches tactics. “You’re better than this place. You’re better than settling in Lima with, with,” She racks her brain, trying to remember what Rachel said it was that Finn did. “With a high school football coach,” she finally stutters out.   
  
Brittany’s eyes flash dangerously. “Don’t attack him. Don’t make fun of what he does. He loves it and he’s good at it.”  
  
She’s not sorry, but she mutters it under her breath anyway and looks away, seeing nothing past the driveway as it fades into the darkness.  
  
“What did you expect, Santana?” Brittany asks, her voice uncomfortably soft and slow.  
  
Santana smiles humorlessly. “Honestly?”  
  
“Honestly,” Brittany echoes.  
  
“I thought you’d jump when I said how high. I thought I could come back and tell you how much of an idiot I was and you would leave with me.” She shakes her head and runs the flat of her palm down one side of her face to her mouth. “Honestly,” she whispers, “I thought you’d be waiting.”  
  
Brittany smiles at her as Santana ducks her head again, studying the crack in the steps she always jumped over –  _”Step on the crack, break your mother’s back!” she used to yell as she jumped the step, ten years old and dirt-smudged knees._. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a hand, almost translucent in the bright security light above them, reaching towards her. It feels like an out-of-body moment when Brittany finally – after 1,268 days (she was counting too, every morning), and too many aborted attempts at calling Brittany – touches her, her slender hand tracing the curve of Santana’s elbow and giving it the slightest tug towards her.  
  
It’s like Santana is off to the side looking over at herself. She watches her body move forward in parts – her arm leading and her torso following and her feet last – and watches as Brittany’s hand slides up her arm over her bicep and to her neck, long fingers bending around and brushing against the small hairs at the base of Santana’s skull.   
  
“You still look the same,” Brittany murmurs. “How do you still look exactly the same?”  
  
She doesn’t, not really. Santana looks more tired, older; haggard, Rachel even said. She looks like she gets an hour of sleep a night and that she eats even less but standing in front of Brittany, standing this close to Brittany, she feels sixteen again,  _alive_  again. Brittany has always seen her differently than everyone else, though; has always seen Santana through a different set of eyes.  
  
It’d be easy to tilt her head up. It wouldn’t be fair to tilt her head up, but it’d be easy enough to tip her head back and lift the tiny inch up, if only to feel Brittany breathing against her mouth. She wills her body - please, please, please just do something right tonight - not to, to stay perfectly still for just a minute longer and then back away, slowly, and let Hudson win this one.  
  
A minute turns into two and three and when Santana tells herself to leave, Brittany’s forehead is pressed against hers and she can’t.  
  
This can’t be it.  
  
This can’t be the end of  _them_.  
  
She won’t let it be their end.  
  
It’s selfish – something she’s familiar with, something she’s always been good at – and wrong and when Brittany pulls away, she’ll probably be smacked hard across the face and pushed away and told to leave and never come back but she doesn’t care; she looks up at Brittany, sees her pale blue eyes are closed and tips her chin, catching Brittany’s bottom lip in her own, willing the moment to last.  
  
Santana counts in her head:  _one, two, three, four, five…_  At  _seven_ , she lets her body relax and her arms wind around Brittany’s waist, pulling her closer, knees going weak at the sensation of Brittany’s body against her own. At  _ten_ , she takes a small step back, and then another and another until her knuckles are scratching against the doorframe. At  _fifteen_  Santana flicks the tip of her tongue at the seam of Brittany’s lips and slides it past, skimming along the ridges of Brittany’s teeth. At  _twenty_  she stops counting and lets her hands slide under Brittany’s top, sliding until they’re pressed against Brittany’s hipbones where they’ve always belonged.   
  
She wants to kiss down the arch of Brittany’s neck or up the line of her jaw to the spot behind her ear but she’s too nervous to move from Brittany’s mouth; too nervous that the blonde will push her away or stop kissing her. So she stays, her hands doing the wandering her mouth cannot, up Brittany’s rib cage and back down, to her neck and up to her cheeks, and the sweeping line of bicep to her hand, still wrapped around Santana’s neck.   
  
Her fingers lacing with Brittany’s breaks the spell.   
  
Brittany leans her head back, taking a deep breath Santana can feel throughout her own body, eyes still closed, face flushed. She shakes her head back and forth, only leaning forward when Santana untangles their hands and grabs the bottom of Brittany’s chin, tugging it down so she can see Brittany.  
  
“Don’t marry him,” she tries again. “Please, don’t marry him. Give me a chance. Give me just one more chance, just one more day.” Her hands slide and grip the back of Brittany’s neck, her forehead tipping against the blonde’s. “Please,” she breathes out.  
  
“He loves me,” Brittany whispers back.  
  
“I’ll always love you more,” Santana promises.  
  
Brittany shakes her head again. “I can’t just leave him. I’m getting married  _tomorrow_ , Santana.”  
  
“But you’re not getting married tonight,” she pleads. “Tonight, you can still tell him no.” She feels the back of her eyes burn and her hands tremble against Brittany’s neck. “Give me one more chance. Just one more.”  
  
\---  
  
Santana sits in the window seat, her leg bouncing up and down violently, shaking her entire body. She bites down on her bottom nail, gnawing at the cuticles around the nail. The guy at the end of the seats, on the aisle, glares at her until she presses down on her knee to stop herself.  
  
“Sorry,” she mutters, turning to look out the window. The land is a giant blur of blues and greens and it numbs her mind enough to the point where a warm hand slides across her knee, under her own and she didn’t even hear anyone sit down. She closes her eyes and turns her head, only opening them when she leans forward and bumps her forehead against a smooth cheek. “Hi,” she murmurs.  
  
The hand under hers turns over, lacing tan fingers with pale ones.  
  
Brittany’s lips graze her forehead. “Hi.”  
  
Somewhere over Chicago – or maybe Indianapolis; everything looks the same from the tiny plane window – her hand caught in Brittany’s, her leg calm and still – Santana Lopez breathes as the world rights itself.


End file.
